Every specialist term used anywhere in this course, in plain language first.

Subnet

A group of computers competing at one specific job, with its own rules for deciding who did that job well.

Validator

A participant whose role is to judge other participants' work and report scores.

Miner

A participant who does the subnet's actual job and submits the result to be judged.

TAO

Bittensor's own currency. New TAO is what the network mints and pays out to reward useful work; it is not created or issued by any single company.

Subnet owner

The account that registers a subnet and writes its rules: what counts as good work, and how that work gets judged.

Stake

Money committed behind a participant — usually a validator — that increases how much say and reward that participant gets, and that can earn less if the participant judges badly.

Root network

A shared pool where money is committed to the network as a whole, rather than to one specific subnet. It has no competitors of its own, but money placed there still counts toward judging power on every subnet, and still earns a share of every subnet's payout.

Alpha

Each subnet's own currency, separate from every other subnet's. It trades against TAO inside that one subnet's own small market, and moving TAO in or out of that market is how someone gets alpha or gives it back.

Emission

The flow of newly created currency the network pays out to whoever builds, does, and judges work.

Weight

A validator's judgment of how good one miner's work is, written as a share of that validator's total judgment across every miner it is grading — not a fixed score, but a proportion.

Yuma Consensus

The network's rule for combining every validator's separate judgments about the same subnet into one official ranking, which then decides how much everyone on that subnet earns.

dTAO

A change made in 2025 that lets each subnet's own currency price — set by ordinary buying and selling — decide how big a share of the network's daily payout that subnet receives, rather than the share being set by a vote or a central decision.

Nominator

Someone who commits stake behind a validator instead of judging anything themselves, and is paid a share of what that validator earns for judging well.

Timelock encryption

Encryption that cannot be undone until a public, verifiable clock elsewhere reaches a set moment — not even the person who encrypted it can open it early.